Applications
WordNet has been used for a number of different purposes in information systems, including word sense disambiguation, information retrieval, automatic text classification, automatic text summarization, machine translation and even automatic crossword puzzle generation.
A project at Brown University started by Jeff Stibel, James A. Anderson, Steve Reiss and others called Applied Cognition Lab created a disambiguator using WordNet in 1998. The project later morphed into a company called Simpli, which is now owned by ValueClick. George Miller joined the Company as a member of the Advisory Board. Simpli built an Internet search engine that utilized a knowledge base principally based on WordNet to disambiguate and expand keywords and synsets to help retrieve information online. WordNet was expanded upon to add increased dimensionality, such as intentionality (used for x), people (Albert Einstein) and colloquial terminology more relevant to Internet search (i.e., blogging, ecommerce). Neural network algorithms searched the expanded WordNet for related terms to disambiguate search keywords (Java, in the sense of coffee) and expand the search synset (Coffee, Drink, Joe) to improve search engine results. Before the company was acquired, it performed searches across search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com and others.
Another prominent example of the use of WordNet is to determine the similarity between words. Various algorithms have been proposed, and these include considering the distance between the conceptual categories of words, as well as considering the hierarchical structure of the WordNet ontology. A number of these WordNet-based word similarity algorithms are implemented in a Perl package called WordNet::Similarity, and in a Python package called NLTK.
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